There's something in the way that Jarkko Lehmus and Diana Loosmore dance together that draws the eye. Last week these two stars of Scottish Ballet were Cinderella's father and stepsister in Ashley Page's fabulous spectacular, apparently lost in the same intense other world they seem to find when they dance contemporary steps together.

As Loosmore was preparing for the unusual sensation of being en pointe, Jack McConnell, Scotland's political Prince Charming, was in his brutalist palace on the edge of Calton Hill, rushing to the defence of a culture of which Scottish Ballet is a leading - some say elitist - part. Talk is of 'frustrated' cabinet meetings, last-minute work and McConnell as a First Minister who has had to re-engage with this area of life.

On Thursday, Patricia Ferguson, the publicity-shy Minister for Culture, will stand up and tell the nation how, to use McConnell's own phrase, culture will be placed 'at the core of everything we do'. She is responding to James Boyle's Cultural Commission, which handed over its report last June. The lights may still be guttering in an all-but-dark Scottish Opera, and Ferguson may be a slim woman, but at long last this is the moment when the fat lady finally sings.

The arm's length principle, where arts bodies are funded without interference, is apparently to be maintained, although there will be major changes to the arm's length body, the Scottish Arts Council. Ferguson looks set to begin by outlining a legal duty for local government to ensure all children are exposed to some culture. There will be more money, although it will still be some way short of the 1 per cent of the Executive's annual budget that Boyle wanted. This is where McConnell is reported to have been forced to use the weight of his office to bang heads together. Meetings continue this weekend to cement the details.

It has been a frenetic few weeks. Ferguson was due to make her statement before Christmas, but events went awry. McConnell's problem has been that many of his cabinet colleagues, and the civil servants who attend them, don't believe culture should be at the core of everything they do. There is no widespread agreement with Magnus Linklater, the former chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, when he talks of 'this most precious of areas'. It became clear to McConnell that nobody would be satisfied with what was planned except the civil servants. They had played on Ferguson's distaste for publicity to kill the possibility of anything sensational and effectively maintain the current system.

In his famous 2003 St Andrew's Day speech, McConnell told the country that culture would be 'our next major enterprise'. McConnell does not see himself as a philistine - at every dinner he holds in his official residence at Bute House he presents young talent from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama - but others have painted him that way. He knows that what Ferguson says on Thursday will seal the public view.

For while devolution has seen a widespread flowering of creativity, nobody offers any credit to the Executive. Funding for the arts has dropped from 0.27 per cent of the Executive's budget to 0.24 per cent. Under this Executive, Scottish Opera has had to avoid large-scale productions for much of the last year.

Well-developed plans for a Scottish National Photography Centre are in danger of running into the sand. There have been six ministers for tourism, culture and sport, one of whom is now in jail.

To deal with funding problems, the Scottish Arts Council, which on Thursday looks set to be merged with Scottish Screen, has been involved in its own 'strategic review'. A gimlet eye has crossed the nation's arts organisations, and the funding body has identified those that succeed, those in need of help and those which should be left to die.

For everyone involved, it has been a long journey. There was widespread disappointment when, rather than make its own decisions, the Executive appointed James Boyle, Radio 4's former controller, to set up a Cultural Commission and come up with a 'generational change'. Boyle, in his report, was astute enough to sense the chill wind blowing around the side of Calton Hill. He provoked the Executive's ire by making the case for a new £100m investment in the arts. He said Ferguson should be given a deputy. He even suggested creative earnings in Scotland should be excused tax.

The Executive felt the report lacked 'focus', and it remains unlikely that any of these recommendations will be met. Yet the area closest to Boyle's heart was the 'rights' and 'entitlements' he wanted to bestow on Scotland's children. The words themselves rubbed bureaucratic salt in artistic wounds, but the philosophy behind them remains solid. These rights look set to form the introduction of Ferguson's speech.

The concept that it should be law that councils ensure that children be given access to the arts went down badly with the civil servants who will have to make it possible. Liberal Democrats in the coalition also believe it to be too nannyish. Rather than provide a new deputy minister, McConnell decided to deal with blockages in the civil service, moving John Mason from the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, and replacing him with Leslie Evans, who is instinctively closer to the arts.

Other forces seem to have got their way. The directors of the national companies are believed to have met secretly to be removed from the Scottish Arts Council's control and to have direct government funding. This, a move called for by the SNP, is also set to happen.

McConnell was spotted watching Lehmus and Loosmore in Cinderella last Wednesday, and is believed to have loved it. Given the make-up of his cabinet, he will never be the fairy godmother the arts community want him to be, yet, if there proves to be enough money attached, he may have conjured up a system that allows artists to prosper, while giving more children tickets to the ball.

Ever since St Andrew's Day 2003 it has been clear he needed to mean it when he said, in relation to culture, that 'the inheritance of our children cannot be a poverty of aspiration or ambition'. It looks as if, by involving himself to the end, weight is about to be attached to those words.